1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an ink jet textile printing apparatus for performing textile printing on a textile material such as cotton, silk, wool, chemical fabric, and blended fabric by ejecting an ink from an ink jet recording head and relates to a method of producing a printed textile.
2. Related Art
In the case of performing textile printing on fabric of, for example, cotton, silk, wool, chemical fiber, or blended fiber, a screen textile printing method using a dyeing stencil or a roller textile printing method using an engraved roller on which a pattern is engraved is employed. Since these textile printing methods use an expensive dyeing stencil or engraved roller, the printed textiles other than mass product fail to match the cost.
On the other hand, textile printing by an ink jet system does not need the dyeing stencil and the engraved roller and is performed using digital data for design. Accordingly, a small volume of printing is possible, and also it is possible to quickly cope with a small change in design and possible to largely reduce throughput time. Furthermore, the textile printing by an ink jet system has an advantage of high freedom in design such that color gradation can be expressed. For example, a small volume of an original product can be easily produced by printing an image such as a photograph based on digital data thereof on clothes such as a T-shirt or a small article made of fabric.
From the above-mentioned points, an ink jet textile printing method performing printing by an ink jet system has been being focused.
In the ink jet textile printing, an ink of pigment or dye is used. The pigment ink is inferior to the dye ink in color tone and clearness, but pre-treatment of a textile material, which is necessary in the dye ink, is not necessary in the pigment, and also the pigment is superior to the dye in fixability to fibers. In addition, though the textile material on which the dye can be printed is limited, the pigment allows printing on various textile materials, and, thereby, textile printing using pigments is being focused.
However, pigments have a problem in that the pigments tend to detach after printing, while dyes fix to fibers of a textile material at the molecular level.
Incidentally, the above-mentioned clothes and other clothing products are frequently washed, and in many cases, the printed portions are rubbed by wearing or using them. Accordingly, in textile printing on fabric such as clothes and other clothing products, ink properties such as washing fastness, abrasion resistance, and fixability are required.
In light of this point, JP-A-2009-215506 and JP-A-2009-057452 disclose that ink properties such as the above-mentioned washing fastness, abrasion resistance, and fixability are improved by adding a resin to a pigment ink.
The degree of improvement in ink properties such as washing fastness, abrasion resistance, and fixability is correlated with the amount of the resin contained in the ink, and in order to obtain a sufficient degree of improvement in the ink properties, a large amount of resin is necessary. Incidentally, an ink that is used for printing on paper also contains a resin in order to enhance the abrasion resistance. However, in order to obtain abrasion resistance that is required in textile printing on, for example, fabric, the amount of the resin must be several times (about three to four times) larger than that of the resin that is contained in the ink for printing on paper. However, an increase in amount of the resin tends to cause problems such as an increase in ink viscosity and decreases in ink discharge stability and recovery performance from nozzle drying.